World War I Book Options

  • Your book must be at least 150 pages. If your book has more than 150 pages, you will only be required to read portions of the book, so don't be scared away by longer books. Please be sure that your book focuses on America's involvement in World War I.

  • You may select biographies, non-fiction, or historical fiction/novels. However, if your choice is not on this list, I would suggest bringing it for approval a day or two ahead since your final choice is due Tuesday, February 14

Origins of American Intervention in the First World War
Ross Gregory

Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda
Alan Axelrod (ocpl.org)

For Home and Country: World War I Propaganda on the Home Front
Celia Kingsbury

Doughboy War: the American Expeditionary Force in World War I
James Hallas (ocpl.org)

Over Here: the First World War and American Society
David Kennedy (ocpl.org)

War’s Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America
Beth Linker


Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the US Army during World War I
Carol Byerly

Doughboys, the Great War, and The Remaking of America
Jennifer D. Keene

Over There: the United States in the Great War
Byron Farewell (ocpl.org)

No Greater Sacrifice, No Greater Love: a son’s journey to Normandy
Walter Ford Carter (ocpl.org)

The letters, excerpted here--from an American soldier who died at Normandy--are filled with candid, innocent, and at times wrenching expressions of love for family, the anguish and agony of war, and unshakable faith in a country's noble cause.

The Millionaires’ Unit: the aristocratic flyboys who fought the Great War and invented Americas airpower

Marc Wortman (ocpl.org)
The Millionaires' Unit is the story of a gilded generation of young men from the zenith of privilege: a Rockefeller, the son of the head of the Union Pacific Railroad, several who counted friends and relatives among presidents and statesmen of the day. They had it all and, remarkably by modern standards, they were prepared to risk it all to fight a distant war in France.


Lusitania: saga and myth
David Ramsay (ocpl.org)

Gentlemen volunteers: the story of American ambulance drivers in the Great War
Arlen Hansen

The Long War home: and American journey from Ellis Island to the Great War
David Laskin (ocpl.org)

An American Soldier In World War I
George Browne

Biographies for:

General John Pershing
Eddie Rickenbacker – Fighting the Flying Circus
Alvin York
Anne Howard Shaw


The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I
Arthur Barbeau

“Out Here at the Front”: the World War I Letters of Nora Saltonstall


Nurses at the Front – Writing the Wounds of the Great War
Margaret Higonnet

Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald